From Websites to Wikidata: Digitising Scotland’s Stories

Data connected to our cultural and industrial heritage are often collated by passionate volunteers, typically in the form of blogs and websites. Decades of effort is invested in these sites, which are then vulnerable to data loss due to technical failures, lack/loss of volunteers, or link rot (Chapekis et al., 2024). In collaboration with undergraduate Computer Science students from the University of St Andrews and Wikimedia UK, two unique datasets (created from the websites for Women’s History Scotland1 and Scottish Brick History2) were extracted, cleaned, uploaded to Wikidata, then used to generate creative websites to allow readers to interact with the data. This data paper will explore the pluses and minuses of our approach, and how we would tackle similar datasets in the future.